BRE to help construction sector see through the clouds

BRE are to lead one of ten collaborative R&D projects sharing £5m of Government funding to overcome barriers to the uptake of cloud-based computing services.

Delivered in partnership with IBM, RIBA Enterprises, Costain and others, the BRE project, lead from our offices in Wales, will address business and technology challenges impeding the adoption of multiple cloud platform computing in the construction sector.

BRE Associate Director Andy Sutton says " the use of multi-cloud computing can bring many advantages to the construction sector, notably allowing the distribution of BIM data across different storage and avoiding a cumbersome single dataset. But currently there are a number of barriers to overcome, notably around interoperability of systems and data protocols. Working with our partners, we hope to show how these can be addressed."

The funding is part of an investment by the UK’s innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board that will support projects addressing three overarching issues that present a challenge to adoption of cloud computing systems – interoperability, resilience of data and identity assurance. The projects aim to show how cloud-based systems will deliver greater value and improved efficiency. Including investment by the participating companies the total value of the projects is around £10 million.